Introductory Words by Rudolf Steiner to the First of Four Educational Lectures

The Inner Attitude of the Teacher

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Introductory Words by Rudolf Steiner to the First of Four Educational Lectures

Rudolf Steiner Archive Document

Lectures Section

Speaking to the teachers at the first Waldorf school in Stuttgart, Steiner
asserts that the unfortunate presence of dishonesty and alienation in society
today cannot be addressed without a completely renewed and holistic education.
He states fact that successful teaching requires a living synthesis of the
"spiritual gymnast," the "ensouled rhetorician," and the "intellectual
professor." Of these, the formative effect of the rhetorician's cultivation
of artistic speech is the most important.

The Inner Attitude of the Teacher

By Rudolf Steiner

The Translator is Unknown
Bn 302a.1; GA 302a; CW 302a

This single lecture is the 1st of 9 lectures in the lecture
series entitled,
Education and Instruction ...,
published in German as,
Erziehung und Unterricht aus Menschenerkenntnis,
And the 1st of 4 lectures in the lecture series entitled,
Balance in Teaching.

Speaking to the teachers at the first Waldorf school in Stuttgart, Steiner
asserts that the unfortunate presence of dishonesty and alienation in society
today cannot be addressed without a completely renewed and holistic education.
He states fact that successful teaching requires a living synthesis of the
“spiritual gymnast,” the “ensouled rhetorician,” and
the “intellectual professor.” Of these, the formative effect of
the rhetorician's cultivation of artistic speech is the most important.

This lecture series is presented here with the kind permission of the
Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung,
Dornach, Switzerland. From Bn 302a.1; GA 302a; CW 302a.

This e.Text edition is provided through the wonderful work of:Various e.Text Transcribers

Thanks to a donation by the Los Angeles Rudolf Steiner Library, this Lecture has been made available.

Introductory Words by Rudolf Steiner

to
the First of Four Educational Lectures

Stuttgart

September 15, 1920

My
dear Friends,

During these days which I am able to spend here, I intended to
give a kind of supplement to many of the things which I brought
before you last year in our introductory educational course.
But the days are so few and, after what I have just been told,
there are so many things which must be done during these days
that I can really hardly say whether I shall be able to get
beyond these scanty introductory words of today. I wanted to
give only an introduction now and then go into greater detail
later, but, as I have said, there are so many things which must
be done that it is almost impossible to speak of any kind of a
programme.

The
subject of which I would like to speak to you in this
Introduction is this: I should like to add more to what I
gave you last year about the teacher himself, the teacher and
the Educator. Of course, all that I shall say with regard to
the being of the teacher must be understood in a completely
aphoristic way, and it will really be best If it gradually
takes its true form in you yourselves, if to a certain extent
it is developed further through your own thinking and feeling.
When we speak of the College of Teachers, it is necessary to
call your attention to the fact that the teachers must really
have a true feeling, a true perception of the nature of the
esoteric as such. And in calling your attention to this, I will
remind you that we take our stand on the Spiritual Science we
learn through Anthroposophy and it is this Spiritual Science
which will give us the form for the Pedagogy necessary for the
present day. In our times, in these days of Democracy, in these
days of journalism, the fact is that people scarcely have a
real, a true feeling for what is meant by
“esoteric,” for people think today what is true is
true and what is right is right, and the true and the right
when they are formulated in any way must then be expressed
before the whole world in the form which is considered correct.
But in real life this is not the case; these things are quite
different. In real life the essential thing is that there are
certain activities which can only be developed if the impulses
for these activities are guarded in the soul as a most sacred
private possession. The teacher in particular would find it
necessary to guard many things as a sacred, private possession
and to look upon this possession as something which only plays
a part in those meetings and conversations which are carried on
within the College of Teachers itself as such. At first a
sentence of this kind does not seem particularly clear, and yet
it will become clear to you. I should have to say a great deal
if I wanted to make it clear, but to begin with it will be
clear if I say the following: —

This sentence which I have just cited has also, at the present
time, a significance which embraces the civilization of the
whole world.

First Lecture — Stuttgart — September 15, 1920

If
today we think of the education of the young, we must bear in
mind that we are concerned with feelings, the ideas, the will
impulses of the next generation; we must be clear that our
present work is to prepare this next generation for definite
tasks which will be accomplished, at some time in the future of
mankind. When a thing of this kind is said, the question at
once arises; Why is it then that humanity has reached the
widespread misery in which it is today? Humanity has entered
into this misery because it has really in essential things made
itself dependent, through and through dependent, on the kind of
thinking and feeling peculiar to the western man. It Is true to
say that when today someone in Central Europe speaks about, e.g.,
Fichte,
Herder
or even
Goethe,
if he belongs to external
public life, either as a journalist, book-wright or the like,
he is much further from the true spiritual impulse living in
Fichte, Herder or Goethe when he is thinking and active in
Berlin or Vienna, than he is from what is felt and thought
today in London, Paris, New York or Chicago. Things have worked
out gradually In such a way that speaking generally our whole
civilization has been flooded by the impulses proceeding from
the philosophy of the western nations and our whole public life
Is lived in the impulses proceeding from the philosophy of
these nations.

It
must also be admitted that this is particularly true where the
art of education is concerned. For from the last third of the
19th century European nations, speaking generally, have learned
from the western nations in all such educational matters, and
today it is taken for granted by those men who discuss or
dispute among other things about questions of education, that
they should make use of the habits of thought which come from
the west. If you trace back all the educational ideas which are
considered reasonable in Central Europe today, you will find
their source in the views of
or similar men.
People do not trace out the numerous paths by which the views
of Spencer and others like him have entered the heads of those
who have to decide about spiritual questions in Central Europe,
but these paths exist? they are to be found. And if you (I will
not lay special stress on the details) take the spirit of the
educational line such as Is to be found, e.g., in Fichte, it Is
now not only absolutely different from that which is generally
looked upon today as sensible pedagogy, but the fact is that
modern men are hardly in a position to think and feel along the
lines which would enable then to understand what was meant by
Fichte and Herder that they could find a way of continuing it.
Thus, our experience today in the realm of pedagogy, especially
in the art of pedagogy, is that the principles that have arisen
are exactly the opposite of what they ought to be. Here I would
like to point out to you something which Spencer has
written.

Spencer was of the opinion that the way of giving object
lessons should be such that they would lead over into the
experience of the naturalist, into the research work of the nan
of science. What then would have to be done in the school?
According to that, we should have to teach the children in
school in such a way that when they are grown up and have the
opportunity they can continue what they have learned in the
school about plants, minerals, animals, etc., so that they can
become regular scientists or natural philosophers. It is true
that this kind of idea Is frequently attacked, but at the sane
tine people really put this principle into practice. And for
this reason; Our textbooks are composed with this in view, and
no one thinks of altering or doing away with our textbooks.
Today the fact is that, e.g., the textbooks on botany are
composed for future botanists rather than for human beings in
general. In the same way textbooks on zoology are written for
future zoologists, not for human beings in general.

Now
the remarkable thing is that we ought to strive for the exact
opposite of that which Spencer has laid down as a true
educational principle. When we are teaching the children about
plants and animals in our Volkschule lessons, we could hardly
imagine a greater mistake in our method of education than to
treat the subject as an introduction to the studies which would
be required to enable the child later to become a botanist or
zoologist. If, on the contrary, you could have arranged your
lessons so that your way of teaching about plants and animals
would hinder the child in question from becoming a botanist or
zoologist, then you would have acted more wisely than by
following Spencer's principle, for no one should become a
botanist or zoologist through what he learns in the Volkschule;
that he can only become through his special gifts which are
revealed by his choice of vocation and which would be sure to
appear during his life if there is a true art of education.
Through his gifts! That is, if he has the gifts necessary for a
botanist, he can become a botanist; and if he has the gifts
necessary for a zoologist, he can become a zoologist.
That can only be the result of the gifts of the child in
question, i.e., of his predetermined Karma. This must come
about through the fact that we recognise this child has the
makings of a botanist, that child has the makings of a
zoologist. It must never be the result of making our Volkschule
lessons in any way a preparation for special scientific
activity. Just think what has happened of late. It has cone
about that unfortunately our “scientists” have been
our educationalists; people who have definitely trained
themselves to think scientifically have been engaged in
pedagogy, have taken a most important part in deciding
educational questions. That is to says it has been thought that
the teacher as such has something to do with the scientist; a
scientific training has actually been taken as a teacher's
training, whereas the two should be completely and absolutely
different. If the teacher is a scientist, if he makes it his
business to think scientifically in a narrow sense (that he can
do as a private man, but not as a teacher), then there comes
about something which does often happen. The teacher cuts
rather a comical figure in his class and among his pupils or
among his colleagues; jokes are made at his expense. Goethe's
“Baccalaureus” in the upper classes is not such a
rarity as is usually supposed.

And
as a matter of fact, if you are asked today whether you would
be more on the side of the teacher when his pupils make jokes
about him or on the side of the scholars, you would under
present educational conditions be more on the side of the
scholars. For it is in our universities that you can best see
whence this has arisen. What are our universities, properly
speaking? Are they institutions for teaching young men
and women or are they institutions for research? They would
like to be both and that is why they have become the
caricatures which they are today. It is usually even held up as
a special feature of our universities that they are at the sane
tine institutions for teaching and for research. But it is in
this way that the bad methods, which cone into our education
when it Is carried out by scientists, work their way first of
all into our highest educational centres. Later these bad.
methods find, their way down into the Mittelschule, and then
finally also into the Volkschule. And it is this which cannot
sufficiently be borne in mind, that the art of education must
proceed from life and that it cannot proceed from abstract
scientific thought.

Now
the remarkable thing is that there is now arising, chiefly out
of the western culture, just what can be called a pedagogy with
a scientific, even a natural scientific, bent and that when we
remember what was to be found in Herder, in Fichte, what was to
be found in Jean Paul, in
Schiller
and similar minds, we know
that here is really a pedagogy, which has been forgotten, taken
from life, a pedagogy drawn directly from life. And now there
lies before us the calling of the Central European nations,
that calling which has its place in the history of the world,
to cherish and develop this pedagogy, to make it their esoteric
task to develop this pedagogy. For many things can be common to
humanity and many things must be common to humanity if an
improvement in social affairs is to come in the future; but the
western nations will not be able to understand what will arise
out of the whole concrete Central European spiritual culture
with regard to the art of education; on the contrary, it will
annoy them, and it really ought not to be told them in its
original form. It could only have an undesirable effect upon
them. It will only be possible to speak of it to them when they
have made up their minds to take their stand on the esoteric
foundation of Spiritual Science. With regard to all those
things which have been looked upon in Germany during the last
forty years with such pride, with regard to all those things
which have been considered such a great advance, Germany has
lost. All this will pass over to the dominion of the western
nations. In this respect there is nothing to be done, and we
can only hope to awaken so much understanding for the threefold
social organism that the western nations will take part in it.
But with regard to what has to be given for the art of
education, we have something to give the world from Central
Europe which no one else can give, not an oriental and not a
western man. But we must know how to keep this among those who
are able to understand it; we must understand how to guard it
with a certain sense of trust, and we must know that it is this
guardianship which will make our work effectual. You must know
exactly about what things you have to be silent before certain
people if you want to obtain a result. Then we must above all
things be clear that there Is nothing to hope from anything
that might come to us from the kind of thought which,
proceeding from the west, is indispensable in many branches of
modern civilization; we must know that there is absolutely
nothing to be expected from this direction for the educational
art we have to develop.

There is a publication about education by Herbert Spencer which
is extraordinarily Interesting. He gives there a whole number
of maxims, of “Principles,” as he calls them, about
the intellectual education of the child. Among these principles
there is one which he especially emphasizes. In teaching you
should never proceed from the abstract, but always from the
concrete; you should always work your subject out from an
individual case. Now in his book about education, before
anything concrete is approached, there is the worst possible
abstract litter, really abstract chaff, and he does not notice
that he is himself carrying out the opposite of those
principles which he sets forth as indispensable. Thus, we have
an illustration of how an eminent, leading philosopher of the
present day absolutely contradicts what he himself
advocates.

Now
you saw last year that our pedagogy has not to be built up on
abstract principles of education, for it was said that we
should not bring things to the child from the outside, but
rather develop the individuality of the child. You know that
our educational art should be built upon a real sympathy with
the child's being, that it should be built up, in the widest
sense, on a knowledge of the growing child, and in our first
course of lectures and then later in our conferences we have
collected sufficient facts about the being of the growing
child. If as teachers we can enter into the child's being,
then, out of our knowledge of the child, there will spring up a
perception of the way in which we should act. In this respect
we must as teachers become artists. Just as it is impossible
for an artist to take a book on aesthetics in his hand in order
to paint or model according to the principles laid down by the
writer, so it should be quite impossible for a teacher to use
an “educational guide” in order to teach, but what
he needs is a real insight into what the child really is, what
he will become as he works his way through childhood. It is
above all necessary that we should be clear about the
followings We teach, let us say, to begin with in the first
class, the 6-7 year old children; now our teaching will always
be bad, will have failed to fulfil its purpose if after we have
worked with this first class for a year we do not say to
ourselves; Who then has really learned the most? It Is I,
the teacher! If we say to ourselves, “At the beginning of
the school year I had excellent educational principles, I have
followed the best educational authorities, have done
everything to carry out these principles;” — If you
really had done this, you really would have taught badly. You
would however certainly have taught best if each morning you
had gone into your class in fear and trembling without over
much confidence in yourself and then had said at the end of the
years you yourself have really learned the most during this
time! For whether you can say: you, yourself have learned the
most depends on how you have acted; it depends upon what you
have really done, depends upon your constantly having had the
feeling: you are growing while you are helping the children to
grow, you are experimenting in the highest sense of the word,
you are not really able to do so very much, but by working with
the children there grows in you a certain power. Sometimes you
will have the feeling: there is not much to be done with this
kind of child, but you will have taken trouble with them. From
other children, owing to their special gifts, you will have had
certain experiences. In short, you have become quite a
different person from what you were before you began, and you
have taught what you would not have been able to teach a year
earlier. At the end of the school year you say: yes, now for
the first time you can do what you ought to have been doing.
This is quite a religious feeling! And here there lies hidden a
certain secret. If at the beginning of the school year you had
really been able to do all you can do at the end, you would
have taught badly. You have given good lessons because you had
to work them out as you went along! I must put the following
paradox before you. You taught well when you did not know at
the beginning what you had learned by the end of the year, and
it would have been harmful if you had already known at the
beginning of the year what you had learned by the end. A
remarkable paradox!

It
is important for many people that they should know this, but it
is most important of all that teachers should know it. For this
is a special case of universal comprehensive understanding; a
knowledge, no matter what the subject is, which can be
comprehended in abstract principles, which can be represented
by Ideas in the mind, can be of no practical value; it is only
what leads to this knowledge, only what is found on the way to
this knowledge that is of any practical value. For this
knowledge which is ours after we have taught for a year,
receives its first value after our death. It is not until after
the death of a man that this knowledge becomes such a reality
that it can further his development, that it can further the
development of the real individual man. In life it is not the
ready knowledge that Is of value, but the work which leads to
the knowledge and particularly in the art of education this
work has its own particular value. It is the same in
education as in the arts, I do not think that an artist
has the right attitude of mind if, when he has finished a work
he does not say to himself; it is only now that you could
really do it. I do not think that an artist has the right
attitude of mind If he is satisfied with any work he has done.
He may have a certain natural egoistic feeling for what he has
done, but he cannot really be satisfied with it. A work of art
when it is finished really loses for the artist a large part of
its interest, and this loss of interest is owing to the
peculiar nature of the knowledge which Is acquired while the
work is being done. And on the other hand, the living element
in a work of art, the life that springs from It, owes its being
to the fact that it has not yet been transmuted into
knowledge.

The
same thing is indeed true with regard to the whole human
organism. Our head is as “finished” as anything can
be finished, for it is formed out of the forces of our last
incarnation; it is over mature. Human heads are all over
mature, even the immature ones. But the rest of the organism is
only at the stage of furnishing the seed for the head in our
next incarnation; it is full of life and energy, but it is
incomplete. It will not be until our death that the rest of our
organization will really show its true form, namely the form of
the forces which are at work in it. The constitution of the
rest of our organism shows that there is flowing life in it;
ossification Is reduced to the minimum in this part of our
organism while in our head it reaches the maximum.

This peculiar kind of real heartfelt modesty, this feeling that
we ourselves are still only becoming, is something which will
give the teachers strength, for more arises out of this feeling
than out of any abstract principles. If when we are in our
class we are conscious that we are doing everything
imperfectly, then we shall teach well. If on the other hand we
are constantly snacking our lips with satisfaction over the
perfection of our teaching, then it is quite certain that we
shall teach badly.

But
now imagine the followings to begin with you have charge of the
teaching of the first class and so on, so that you have gone
through everything that has to be gone through, of excitements,
disappointments, successes too, if you will. Imagine that you
have gone through all the classes of the Volkschule; at the end
of each year you have spoken to yourself somewhat after the
fashion that I have just described, and now you go down again
from the eighth to the first class. Yes, now it might be
supposed that you must say to yourself; now I am beginning with
what I have learned, now I shall be able to do it well, I shall
be an excellent teache! But it will not be like that. The
course of your new class will bring something quite different
before your mind. At the end of the second third of each school
year, you will say just the same out of a really right feeling.
I have now learned what it was possible to learn about seven,
eight and nine-year old children by working with them; at the
end of each school year I know what I ought to have done. But
when you have reached the fourth or fifth, school year, you
will again not know how you really ought to have taught. For
now, you will correct what you thought to be right after you
have taught for a year. And so, after you have finished the
eighth school year and have corrected everything, if you really
have the good fortune to begin again at the first school year,
you will be in the same position, only you will teach in a
different spirit. But if you go through your teaching with
true, noble, not with mock scepticism, you will find that your
diffidence has brought you an imponderable power which will
make you peculiarly fitted to accomplish more with the children
that are entrusted to you. That is doubtless true. The effect
however in life will really then only be a different one, not
one that is so much better, but a different effect. I might say
that the quality which you bring about in the children will not
be much better than the first time; the effect will only be a
different one. You will attain something different in quality
but not much more in quantity. You will attain something that
is different in quality and that is sufficient, for
everything which we acquire in the way described with the
necessary, noble diffidence and heartfelt humility has the
effect that we are able to make individualities out of the
children; on the whole they become individualities. We cannot
have the same class twice over and send out into the world the
same copies of a cut and dried educational pattern.

We
can however give the world figures which are individually
different. We bring about many-sidedness in life. This does not
depend on the working out of abstract principles, but rather
this many-sidedness in life depends on a deeper understanding
of life such as has been put before you.

Thus, you can see that what matters more than anything else in
a teacher is the way in which he regards his holy calling. That
is not without significance, for the most Important things In
teaching and in education are those which are imponderable. A
teacher who enters his classroom with this feeling in his heart
achieves something different from another. Just as, even
in everyday life It is not always the largest thing physically
that determines our standard but something quite small, so also
it is not always what we do with the largest number of words
which carries most weight, but sometimes It is that perception,
that feeling which we have built up in our hearts before we
enter the classroom. There Is one thing especially which is of
great importance. That is that we must quickly strip off our
narrower, personal self like a snake skin when we go into the
class. A teacher may in certain circumstances, because
he, as is sometimes said with such self-satisfaction, is
also only human, go through all sorts of experiences between
the end of a class one day and beginning again on the next. It
may be that he has been warned by his creditors, or he may have
had a quarrel with his wife, as does happen in life.

These are things which bring disharmonies. Disharmonies of this
kind give a man's frame of mind a certain tendency; so also do
happy joyous feelings. The father of one of your pupils, if he
particularly likes you, may have sent you a hare after he has
been out hunting, or a bunch of flowers perhaps, if you are a
lady teacher. What I mean is that it is quite a natural thing
in life to have moods of this kind. As teachers we must train
ourselves to lay aside these moods and to give ourselves up
entirely to the content of the subject we are going to teach,
so that we are really able in presenting one subject to speak
tragically, taking our mood from our subject and then to pass
over into a humorous mood as we proceed with our lesson, in
this way entering completely into our subject. The important
thing however is that we should now be able to perceive the
whole reaction of the class to tragedy or sentimentality or
humour. Then, when we are in a position to do this, we shall be
aware that tragedy, sentimentality and humour are of
extraordinary significance for the souls of children. And if we
allow our lessons to be carried along by an alternation between
humour, sentimentality and tragedy, if we pass from the one
mood into the other and back again, if we are really able,
after presenting something for which we needed a certain
heaviness, to pass over into a certain lightness, not a forced
lightness, but one that arises because we are living in our
lesson, then we are bringing about in the soul something akin
to the in and outbreathing in the bodily organism. In teaching,
our object is not to teach merely intellectually or
intellectualistically, but to be able to really take these
various moods into consideration. For what is tragedy,
what is sentimentality, what is a “melancholic”
mood? It is just the same as an inbreathing in the organism,
the same as filling the organism with air. Tragedy signifies
that we are trying harder and harder to draw our physical body
together so that in our drawing together of the physical body
we are aware how the astral body comes ever more and more out
of the physical body owing to the drawing together of the
physical body. A humorous mood signifies that we paralyze the
physical body, but with the astral body we do just the opposite
of what we did before; we stretch it out as far as possible,
stretch it out over its surroundings so that we are aware, if
we, e.g., do not merely see redness but grow into it, how we
stretch out our astral body beyond this redness, pass over into
it. Laughing simply means that we drive the astral body out of
our face; laughing is simply nothing else but an outbreathing.
Only, if we want to apply all this, we must have a certain
feeling for the force there is in these things. It is not
always advisable to go straight over into something humorous
when we have just had something serious or melancholy, but if
we can always have in our lessons the means of preventing the
childish soul from being imprisoned by the serious, the tragic,
and of freeing it so that it can really experience this
breathing in and out between the two frames of mind.

I
have now told you something of the variety of moods which
should be taken into consideration by the teacher, for this is
just as necessary as any other part of special pedagogy.